We don’t have an off-season anymore!”
Veteran Olympian, noting change in his sport over the course of his national team career

American kids are so spoiled. They always need to be entertained. Sometimes you just have to do the long hard boring work. I never questioned this when I was an athlete.
Medal winning Olympic coach and athlete from the former Soviet Union

I have done these same camps, these same drills, at the same places for nine years. I can’t take another two seasons of the same thing!
Olympic Medallist, leaving her sport two years before another Olympic Games

You can’t get much done in life if you only work on the days when you feel good.
Jerry West, NBA Hall Of Fame athlete and general manager of the LA Lakers

This column briefly describes a variety of strategies coaches have used successfully to motivate athletes, avoid under-recovery, maintain practice intensity and keep the fire burning in a decade of championship development.

1. Don’t eliminate challenges; instead, create new ones. During psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on “flow,” he found a peak performance state was achieved when individuals were faced with a challenge roughly equal to their skills. When faced with a challenge greater than their skills, they became frustrated, and when faced with a challenge below their skill level, they were bored. Frustration and boredom are a real danger with “volume” work in many sports. Although this type of work is necessary, many athletes learn bad habits by only going through the motions on high volume days. By identifying and achieving new challenges during volume work, athletes stay sharper and avoid boredom. Examples of new challenges could include:

a. An effort to exactly repeat split times across many intervals in swimming (challenge consists of increased self-awareness, technique control and pacing);
b. Attempt using at least eight different techniques in a basketball lay-up drill (challenges are developing creativity, visualizing game situations and quality execution);
c. Alpine skiing without poles (this forces athletes to consciously focus on balance and footwork).

2. Find new ways to modify the training environment. Although all humans have a need for stability, we also have a need for novelty and variety in our environments. Coaches should balance the advantages of a uniform, predictable training environment with the potential advantages of intentionally changing the environment.

a. Change location. When Lance Armstrong was trying to find his familiar desire to ride bike again (following cancer recovery, he made a brief comeback and then stopped racing ¯ perhaps forever), he and his coach, Chris Carmichael, arrived at the idea of traveling to North Carolina, the site of past racing glory. They held a ten-day training camp with a fun former teammate. Riding mostly in the rain on old country roads, Armstrong rekindled a love of riding, training hard and focusing efforts on increased fitness. With Carmichael’s effort to get him out of his Texas surroundings and away from distractions, Armstrong’s amazing comeback began. The rest, as they say, is history.

b. Change training patterns. All of us have repeated behaviors and patterns about which we rarely think, so coaches frequently structure training sessions based on tradition rather than specific need. There are endless ways to change patterns of repeated behavior. Examples may include: switching the content of morning and afternoon practice sessions, having assistants lead the session, having athletes choose the structure from a menu of choices or going twice as long one day with a day off versus two medium length days.

Without changing the effectiveness of your training program, can you make a conscious plan to regularly change the pattern of training to keep it fresh and novel? If you plan for regular change, you can still have a highly structured, scientific training program, but the small changes will satisfy athletes’ needs for novelty and variety.

3. Periodically change athletes’ internal thinking by changing the way you interact with them. Sometimes, it is athletes’ internal thinking that becomes stale, predictable and unproductive. Coaches can do a number of things to change thinking for each practice. Some examples include:

a. Quiet practice. One Olympic coach has occasional “quiet practices” when the athletes and staff are asked to remain silent. By eliminating all conversations, athletes are forced to pay attention to their own thinking and become more focused. In addition, a quiet practice makes everyone more aware of the importance of good communication on normal training days.

b. Pre-training goals. Another Olympic coach meets with all his athletes the night before training and asks them to identify one thing they wish to work on the next day. At the next day’s training start, he reminds them of one simple focus for the day. The coach finds that this significantly speeds up technical improvements and makes feedback easier.

c. Imagery before action. An excellent development coach has her athletes visualize performing a new technique for two minutes before attempting to perform it. She asks if they can “feel” the new technique, and if they can’t she wants to understand why. She sometimes gives them a technical cue and asks them to visualize again before trying the technique. The coach found that the extra time spent on visualization actually reduces learning time. By forcing athletes to quietly focus, they experience more success.

d. Give your own feedback. One national coach videotapes during practice, approaches athletes and asks them to “watch the video like a coach.” He asks what advice a good coach would give. Surprisingly, many athletes show much more openness to feedback when they give it to themselves. In addition, forcing athletes to make comments on technique makes them more aware of skill development.

e. Fines for “stinky thinking.” Penalizing pessimism by recording fines for any time an athlete says, “I can’t” is a technique used by a coach who feels his athletes often limit themselves. Additionally, this technique can be used to fine negativity about the environment, equipment or teammates. The fine money can be used for an end of the month party, to buy a movie for the team DVD player or for another type of positive reward for the team. Making athletes aware of negative comments makes them aware of how much control they have over their own moods and behavior during practice. Be careful! When first used, this technique may make athletes angry!

4. Do one thing perfectly every day. One problem with endless months of training is the athletes’ sense that some days, it feels as if they only go through the motions. As a coach, your own feelings are frequently a good guide to athletes’ occasional tendency to shut down the brain a bit. Thinking about the rest of your life, errands, laundry, relationships, etc. may be inescapable when training so many hours of many days for many months. On the other hand, simply going through the motions can result in unconscious bad habits and bad technique.

If you face this problem in your sport, one solution is to remind athletes that no matter how dreary or boring the day’s practice, you expect them to do one thing perfectly today. They may do it at the beginning or end of practice, but they need to be able to walk away from training knowing that it is impossible to do that one thing better than they did it that day. It can be anything from perfect technique to a perfect stretch before practice or perfect footwork pattern into a triple axle. The good thing about this strategy is that it has multiple effects. It makes athletes aware that much of their training is far from perfect. It builds confidence in athletes who have a hard time giving themselves credit for good training. Finally, it makes even the most mundane practice a time and place for personal excellence. For those athletes who protest that all of practice should be perfect, ask them to walk across the pool and get back to you!

5. Pick three minutes to dominate. An alternative to “one perfect thing” strategy is choosing a small period of time to excel within a long practice. This is a useful mental strategy for athletes in sports with an opponent such as wrestling, judo, tennis and boxing, in which practice can last for hours. As a mental reaction to the fact that you can’t go all out all the time, most athletes tend to either go at 90 percent all the time or go hard until they get tired. Both of these strategies can result in losing points to an opponent, causing athletes to lose confidence. They should pick a small period of time (three to 10 minutes) in which they go all out, dominate and attack relentlessly.

This control of a few minutes allows them to measure their true abilities, build confidence and be sure that they can defeat their opponent. This strategy allows the coach to build-in the long, high-volume practices necessary to over-learn techniques without athletes losing their competitive edge.

6. Invent games. All athletes and coaches start sport because it is fun. Don’t let the decade of serious effort to be a champion wring the fun out of you or your athletes. Virtually every athlete loves games. A creative coach can turn almost every technical drill into a game, and throwing games into practice settings generates new energy. After a week or two of repetitive drills, adding a new game can raise intensity and remind everyone why they love their sport. As always, make sure the competition that comes with games is working for you. I’ve seen athletes become enraged after losing a completely silly game to a teammate, and this may not help your coaching! Think of your technical goals for the next few weeks and invent a competitive or non-competitive game to teach each skill. It is almost always time well spent.

7. Always have a goal, even if the goal is to do less today than yesterday. It may be three months before your next competition. You may be in a high-volume, low intensity, repetitive training phase. What is the goal for the afternoon practice? Is it clear to you? Is it clear to your athletes? By making athletes aware of your goals for every practice, you are modeling the skills they need to develop to be the best.

Often, by setting specific goals for every single training session, coaches discover that they should be doing less. For example, the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers decided that the goals of most practices should be developing explosiveness and running plays at game speed. It wasn’t to learn how to hit. They started having practices without pads, dramatically reducing hard hits in training. This is one reason they were always among the best at the end of the season. Their players were healthy. Coach Mike Shanahan joined the 49ers as an assistant and couldn’t understand it at first. Now with the Denver Broncos, Shanahan, one of the most goal-driven coaches in football, repeats this “gain more by doing less” practice with his team.

Ten years is a long time to train and compete, and part of the process of developing champions is simply to keep them going ¯ stopping the fire from going out. Using the seven strategies from this column has helped our best coaches to stir the coals, making small sparks that may make a big difference in the long run.